Westfield

overview

With nearly $2 billion in revenue and 2,400 employees nationwide, including 1,700 in its home office, Westfield sells a variety of insurance products exclusively through a network of more than 1,000 agents.

Share

Fast Facts

Industry:

Financial Services

Role:

Marketers

Human Resources

Customer Experience

Insights professionals

Use case:

Customer experience

Employee engagement

Business Outcome:

Improve customer satisfaction

Drive revenue growth

De-risk decisions

Business Challenge

Keeping employees engaged and attracting new talent is an urgent issue in an industry dominated by baby boomers on the verge of retirement. It’s equally important for Westfield to ensure its exclusive network of independent insurance brokers and agents across America feel important and well-informed.

Solution

To keep both parties engaged, the company launched the Westfield Employee Panel, an insight community of over 1,000 employees, and the Westfield Agency Panel, with more than 800 agent members.

One of Westfield’s corporate goals is to “attract, develop, empower and retain quality people.” Understanding employee needs and listening to their opinions is key to meeting this goal. Westfield’s employee community helps the company gain a deeper understanding of employee needs, wishes and opinions on a range of topics, from employees’ physical workspaces to internal communications and retirement programs. Westfield’s agent community creates a robust, ongoing feedback loop, promoting awareness of Westfield and ensuring agents are kept updated on developments at the company.

The Employee Panel helps keep employees engaged, more productive, and proud to work at Westfield. This meaningful engagement with staff helps Westfield enjoy a sustainable employee engagement rate of 87 percent, higher than industry and U.S. company benchmarks. The community provides Westfield with specific actionable insight to improve the employee experience. For example, dialogue about dining options revealed that employees wanted more nutrition information available within on-campus menus. Based on that feedback, the cafeteria now provides nutrition information on as many menu items as possible. The community also helped the IT team implement a new on-boarding process, which raised hire process satisfaction scores.

The Westfield agent community allows the company to track industry norms and ensure it’s consistently delivering an effective streamlined service for agents. Westfield’s agents craved a streamlined, automated system for quoting, applications and policy issuance. For agents accessing multiple systems, it can be very frustrating to have to search for and enter customer information multiple times. Understanding this challenge helped Westfield refine its automation capabilities, which in turn made it easier for agents to do business. This change gave Westfield a competitive advantage, as agents prefer to work for insurance providers that have the fastest and most efficient systems in place. The ongoing feedback Westfield gets from its agent community ensures the company can prioritize and focus future automation investments for the biggest impact.

The insight community helps Westfield be who we say we are—we share knowledge and we build trust, not only with customers and agents, but with our own employees as well.

-Amy Feeman, Research Professional, Westfield Insurance

Learn how other companies are using Vision Critical's customer intelligence platform